Ashley Benson, 23, knows what sells to America's 12-year-old girls: sex, including threesomes. Together with Seventeen magazine, the actress is promoting her new movie “Spring Breakers” on the magazine's cover, despite the fact that the movie is being hyped elsewhere for its steamy sex scene between Benson, actress Vanessa Hudgens, 24, and actor James Franco. The movie is rated R for strong sexual content, language, nudity, drug use and violence. Seventeen targets an audience of females, aged 12 to 19.

There is a psychological sea change occurring in American culture, wherein girls shy of their teenage years are now exposed to erotic imagery and storylines, routinely.

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The sexualization of children is a runaway train—and they are being brought aboard.

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This is a predictable event in a culture being sterilized by technology and by the contention that gender roles are irrelevant: People find ways to remind themselves they are alive and passionate males and females. And if social forces attempt to neuter them, they will—with all the risk entailed—assert themselves sexually.

Sex and violence are now one of the only ways humans seem able to evidence that they are human. And so, as Facebook takes away our real faces, as drones take away hand-to-hand combat, and email takes away handwritten notes, we see bloody, extreme MMA fighting replacing boxing, and Ashley Benson replacing Elizabeth Taylor.

Genital contact (along with brawling) is now America’s reflex antidote to losing contact. And the antidote is being peddled indiscriminately to kids, who are being dragged right out of childhood by a vicious undertow of eroticism fueled by tides of primal fear that we are not really living life at all, nor are we male, nor are we female, nor need we be troubled (just take Prozac), nor need we be distracted (just take Adderall), nor need we be anxious or bored (just take medical marijuana), nor are we responsible for ourselves (just apply for government entitlements).

The toll of using sex as a drug is, of course, the same as using any drug. You get high and temporarily avoid struggling to face what troubles you and pursue the dreams that motivate you and choose the values that will guide you.

The hard work of becoming a complete individual is put off, in favor of getting off. And one’s value to society is minimized. This is why a culture that drugs people—especially children—with sex is a culture in decline.

In this American culture, celebrities like Benson and magazines like Seventeen are our drug pushers. They may not even know it or, worse, yet, they may not even care.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team. Dr. Ablow can be reached at info@keithablow.com.